The 4 trends of digital customer engagement in 2024

After a year 2023 rich in innovations in the field ofArtificial Intelligence (AI) in all sectors: whether in terms of generative AI with content generation, medical imaging analysis in the healthcare sector or the use of AI to combat cyber threats. Companies focusing on customer relations intend to build on this momentum in 2024 by keeping this technology at the heart of their strategy, as demonstrated by the study on The State of Personalization by Twilio.

As the new year begins, Twilio, the customer engagement platform that enables leading brands to create personalized experiences in real time, unveils the 4 trends that are set to shape the customer engagement sector.

Creativity: the key to a successful AI strategy

Today, 92% of companies are using AI-based personalization to drive growth. However, as the automation offered by this technology matures, brands will face a new challenge: how to bring value to customers, whether in their online or in-store journey.

Many companies are already implementing AI to improve their customer relations. However, they are not yet exploiting its full potential because their existing technology stack is still too much built on rational foundations and lacks an element of creativity.

In order to deliver the value consumers are looking for, companies will need to think more creatively about implementing AI in customer relations. This creativity can be achieved by recruiting people with both technical and soft skills, giving them a real overview of customer relations projects. In this way, AI investments will be more profitable.

For example, Italian company Arduino uses the CustomerAI solution to reliably predict customer purchase intentions based on hundreds of data points and various APIs. This solution has enabled them to transform the way they interact with their website visitors, categorizing them into "casual browsers" and "ready-to-buy" consumers. In this way, Arduino can focus its spending exclusively on consumers ready to commit, while providing personalized assistance to those who are in the process of thinking about it.

Increasingly engaged customers

The advent of ChatGPT has also given the general public the opportunity to appropriate and familiarize themselves with AI. Although it can be a source of mistrust on the consumer side, this technology can also lead them to act differently in their interactions with brands.

So in 2024, one element could appear in the exchanges between brands and consumers:

Customers will continue to outpace organizations, both in terms of digital engagement and in the way they want brands to approach them. In fact, there is a gap between what customers want and the implementation of the right solution by companies, due to internal delays, thus holding back the innovation that customers are looking for. Companies are therefore missing an opportunity to engage their customers and potential customers at the right time.

With a Customer Data Platform (CDP) like Twilio's, companies can find all their customer preference data in one place, so they can better anticipate and respond to their customers' needs. By adding this AI brick, they can also generate content customized to their needs, while sending it to the customer's preferred channel.

AI-enhanced voice: a channel to focus on in customer relations

In 2024, companies will be well advised to focus on a particular channel when it comes to AI. They can, of course, base this choice on the channel preferred by customers. However, Twilio notes that one in particular will stand out: voice.

Indeed, voice remains one of the most widely used channels for the most complex queries. Companies will therefore need to take greater advantage of interactions carried out via this channel to optimize customer engagement. Augmented by AI, voice can be used to transcribe and analyze call recordings on a large scale to inform future interactions and improve the end-customer experience. From the detection of key words and phrases to the categorization of calls, the tool identifies significant trends that can strongly contribute to the creation of a tailored, hyper-personalized service.

Twilio's Voice Intelligence solution can be the ideal tool for companies looking to optimize voice for customer relations.

Company transparency: a key factor

According to the State of Personalization report, only 41% of consumers worldwide (36% in Europe) accept that companies use AI to personalize their experiences. A distrust that should push companies in 2024 to rely more on transparency, whether in terms of data use and control, but also vis-à-vis the technology partners they may collaborate with for an AI implementation.

What's more, with regulations around AI constantly evolving, both internationally and locally, companies have every interest in aligning themselves with these points to reassure the general public about their legal compliance.

With this aim of transparency in mind, Twilio recently launched " AI Nutrition Fact Labels ", an initiative that makes it easy to understand what a company's AI products and features contain. Thanks to this label, individuals are able to easily assimilate key information around the level of confidentiality and design elements of AI models. In addition, Twilio also relies on pillars of transparency and accountability, which enable its customers to make informed choices, giving them full visibility over:

• AI providers and the types of models used
• How customer data is used by these models.

Customer relations represent an important lever for companies that want to retain consumers, but also engage new ones. Companies therefore have an interest in leveraging AI in their customer engagement strategies. Indeed, according to the study "Artificial Intelligence at the service of the customer journey", consumers want AI to add value to their interactions with brands. For example, 50% of French consumers want AI to be able to speed up the response to a query , and 48% want it to be able tooffer a detailed response to a request.

By optimizing their customer engagement strategy along these lines, companies can better anticipate the new year and the challenges that will accompany it.

About Twilio:

Today's leading companies rely on Twilio's Customer Engagement Platform (CEP) to establish direct, personalized relationships with their customers around the world. Twilio enables companies to leverage communications and data to bring intelligence and security to every stage of the customer journey, from sales and marketing to growth, customer service and many other flexible and programmable engagement use cases. In 180 countries, millions of developers and hundreds of thousands of companies are using Twilio to create magical experiences for their customers. For more information, please visit: www.twilio.com

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